Bob worked to swallow a huge mouthful of chicken breast and steamed vegetables. He was one of those no-carb freaks, a paleo-dieter, which explained his negligible body fat. But it was unclear to Zack how he kept up his huge body mass on that. Finally he said, “Anybody else think that was some spooky shit?”
Zack thought he wasn’t wrong. Shortly after that inexplicable violation of radio protocol – the woman’s scream – they lost contact with Rumpus 555 entirely. The last they saw of them and their SNA charges, the whole formation was retreating back into the treeline, where the aerial video couldn’t follow.
“Thanks for your help,” was the last transmission Zack got from the SF TOC. He also got the vague impression they were launching a heliborne QRF.
“What I’d like to understand,” Baxter said, showing keen understanding of the job of the analyst (understanding things), “is who those foot mobiles were. Could they have been, like, refugees? Fleeing the epidemic?”
That hadn’t actually occurred to Zack. He did a little quick mental geo-mapping, and concluded that their location and direction of travel would put their origin roughly on a vector with the tussle at that outlying clinic. This kind of dot-connecting was why Zack got paid the big bucks.
“And by spooky shit,” Bob said, “I also mean the fact that we got stood down right as whatever was going down went down. Like maybe somebody thought it was better if we didn’t know about it. Containment sort of thing.”
“Five points for creativity,” Dugan said, pushing his half-full plate away from him. He was on full blast all the time, and bird-like in both energy level and food consumption. “But minus 200 for paranoia. You’ve worked for the government too long to imagine they have the resources or competence to cover shit up. Never attribute to conspiracy that which can adequately be explained by clusterfuckery. Which is pretty much everything.”
Baxter shifted in his seat, adjusted his glasses in the middling light. “What did you guys find out there, anyway?”
Zack arched his eyebrows back at him.
“At the hospital.”
“Oh, right.” In all the madness after their return, Zack had completely forgotten to brief the others on it. Never mind write it up. He pushed his chair back and cleared his throat.
“There was a quarantine tent, outside the building, local medical personnel running it.” He paused, not sure how much to disturb the two who hadn’t been there. Fuck it, he thought. “It was a horror show. Blood sprays on the inside of the plastic. Writhing guys strapped down on cots and gurneys. Doctors and nurses in biohazard outfits. Or what passes for them around here – gowns, gloves, and face masks. Goggles for a few.”
“They’re brave sons of bitches,” Dugan added. His eyes looked like they were seeing something elsewhere.
Bob squared up his bulk and a thought visibly crossed his face. “How close did you get?”
“Don’t worry,” Zack said. “Basically we just took a couple of peeks through the flap as guys came and went.”
“And we had gloves and masks,” Dugan said. “Thinking-ahead points for Zack.”
On a certain level, Zack felt, everything was a game to the SEALs. Or, at least, everything was competitive. That was the thing about real high-performers – they were virtually never not performing. Also, Zack knew they were technically ex-SEALs, but it seemed more distinction than difference, so he continued to think of them that way. And he was pretty sure they still thought of themselves that way.
“I’ll file it after this,” Zack said.
“Still nursing your pet bioweapons theories?” Dugan asked. Zack half-remembered he had let some of his ideas about this slip to Dugan along the way.
“And you never did tell me what went down here, the virus thing, before I rotated in,” Baxter said.
“Yeah,” said Bob.
Okay, Zack thought. Maybe I let it slip to everybody. He pushed his own bowl away and wiped his mouth. Can’t somebody do something about the slasher-movie lighting in here? he thought. Actually, as he knew, that wasn’t fair. The SEALs were pretty kick-ass handymen. Guys like them tended to be.
He started telling the tale. “A few deployments back. We had some grade-A nightmare-fuel intel. It was sketchy and incomplete, but double-corroborated from independent sources. Anybody remember Sheikh Atom?”
Baxter all but raised his hand. “Sheikh Mohamed Said Atom – arms smuggler, warlord, and al-Shabaab commander. Deceased.”
“He is now. Prior to that, we learned he had hooked up with a former Soviet bioscientist, a project leader at their bioweapons research facility at Stepnogorsk. In Kazakhstan.” Zack paused to search his memory. “Guy was a Kazkah. Hungry. No loyalties. Didn’t give a shit, especially after the Cold War. Really good at making things like antibiotic-resistant strains of killer diseases. Domain expert in smallpox and plague. Might have been involved in bioengineering what they call chimera viruses – hybrids that would give you Ebola and smallpox in a single bug.”
“Sounds like a nice man,” Bob said. “Was Atom shopping?”
“We thought so. Didn’t know exactly what for. But we knew it couldn’t be good. And we needed to find out for sure – so we could secure and destroy any stocks of pathogens, as well as whack Atom, who was becoming a real pain in everybody’s ass. So JSOC sent us two Delta shooters, one of whom had deep local knowledge. Perfect Somali, perfect English, good Urdu, a little Pashto. Good Arabic. We were able to get this person inserted, undercover, posing as a Pakistani bioweaponeer, to help them weaponize whatever stocks they had.”
“Did it work?” Dugan said.
“Yeah. She secured the virus stocks. And then she killed Atom.”
“Shit – she?” Both Bob and Dugan sat up straighter.
Zack ignored this. “She was also able to tell us exactly what they thought they had, which we also later verified in the lab.” He paused, pinned the eyes around the table in turn.
Dugan said, “Enough with the spooky pauses. Say it.”
“It was a chimera virus: a combination of myelin toxin and smallpox.”
Baxter looked more wide-eyed than usual. “Myelin toxin?”
Zack stood up. “That freshman elective lecture will be delivered at a subsequent class. Right now I have to file the hospital report. And then I think I need to talk to my CI.”
“Abo?”
“Yeah. I’m hoping he’ll have a view from the other end of that ambush out in the boonies just now, if it was in fact a-S guys jumping our ODA. Also, maybe how it played out after we cleared out.”
“Good idea,” Dugan said. “That reminds me I need to do a video call with Chloe…”
“Oh, so that’s your mother’s name,” Bob quipped.
“Not quite. She’s a fashion executive in Paris.”
“And former model, no doubt,” Zack said as he cleared away his plate. Dugan just grinned, winningly. Before turning to leave, Zack signed off with, “Alpha Mike Foxtrot.”
“AMF?” Baxter asked.
“Adios… my friends.” And with that he was gone.
He could hear the SEALs guffawing behind him. It also sounded like maybe one of them slapped Baxter on the head or chest.
It was all part of the fun.
Chimera
It only took Zack thirty minutes to write up the brief on the hospital quarantine, working from notes he’d made at scene. He also included some photos he shot on his phone. He attached flags to the report that he hoped would ensure it got looked at promptly, and distributed widely. Really, they should be calling CDC on the red phone.
And so that just left his phone call. Zack was self-admittedly super-paranoid about calling Abo, his informer in al-Shabaab. He always did it in the bedroom he shared with Baxter – without Baxter in it. Barring emergency, there were only two times a day when he was allowed to call or text. That’s if Abo didn't text first to tell him not to.
The time was now.
Zack pulled out the new phone he’d drawn from stores, pressed t
he door shut, and sat on his rack. He told the phone to use the satnet. GSM worked most of the time around there, but you didn’t want to depend on it.
Abo didn’t pick up. Zack only let it ring twice. You never knew if he’d have a gun in his mouth and a jihadi staring at the phone’s screen, reading, “Baba wito…” Zack’s Swahili was fine, but he didn’t fancy his chances impersonating Abo’s father. Who, incidentally, was dead.
Both of Abo’s parents were – of AIDS. Zack was amazed Abo wasn’t dead as well, of any of a dozen causes.
The two of them had been childhood friends, years and lifetimes ago in Kenya. Or, the closest thing Zack had to a childhood friend. Abo was one of the token Kikuyu who got shipped in to Zack’s posh English school in the Highlands. Zack befriended him because, foreign and powerless as the new boy was, he was just about the only one who didn’t make Zack feel like an impostor. And even he did, just less so. To say they ultimately went in different directions would be to massively understate the case.
Many years later, when Abo’s photo turned up in a classified portfolio of low-level runners for al-Shabaab, Zack saw a chance. It had been hell arranging a safe meeting. But they did it, and Zack offered Abo a one-way ticket out – all the way to those United States of America. This would be in return for one full year’s service, working as the CIA’s informant in the Islamist terror organization.
Abo went for it.
Zack figured he would. He was basically a good kid. He just never had the chances Zack did. Now he’d been given one. And he seemed grateful. He said he wanted to live in LA.
Oh well, Zack figured. Everyone’s stupid about something.
He dropped the phone beside him and stretched out, fingers knitted behind his head. A nap would be nice. But there were still sirens going by outside every few minutes. And he was too wound up to sleep, which was his usual state lately.
In the last few minutes, Baxter had identified (maybe) a connection between the outbreak and the ambush on their Special Forces – or, rather, the herd of randoms that had wandered into the middle of it. And Zack had mentally connected it (also a big maybe) to the ruckus at the clinic. Now he was feeling super-interested in the nature of this new virus. Excuse me, he mentally amended, “illness.” As far as he knew, nobody yet knew if it was a viral infection. It could as easily be bacterial, fungal, parasitic… or prions, maybe.
Hell, who am I kidding? It’s going to be a virus.
He could feel it.
* * *
Baxter knocked once and opened the door. Zack was still lying there, hands behind neck, staring at the mold-stained ceiling. Baxter paused in the doorway, backlit from the hall.
“So, myelin toxin,” Zack said, simply picking up where he left off. He did this for no good reason. Other than maybe because it was his job to train up the new guy.
“Myelin toxin,” Baxter echoed.
Zack paused. “How much do you know about Biopreparat?”
Baxter nodded. “The Soviet biowarfare program. Ran for decades before the dissolution of the USSR. Big on genetically engineered bioweapons.”
“Correct. But you need to understand this was bioweapons development on an industrial scale. The program stretched across 40 facilities in 15 cities, in all seven of Russia’s time zones. It also had tens of billions of rubles in funding, as well as tens of thousands of scientists, microbiologists, bioweaponeers, industrial designers, support personnel…”
Zack paused to scratch his stubble, which was coming in itchy as always. He’d have to work in a shave somewhere along the way. “They did variations on all kinds of horrific shit, engineered to be even more virulent and contagious than nature made them. New versions of typhus, smallpox, yellow fever, and encephalitis that cannot be vaccinated against. Special strains of anthrax, plague, tularemia, designed to be resistant to all known antibiotics.”
“Jesus,” Baxter said. “Imagine the social impact of an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant plague…”
“Yeah, do. No, don’t.”
“And one of their guys hooked up with al-Shabaab?”
“Yes,” Zack said. “And Biopreparat, or as they called it internally, ‘the System,’ also had a project called Bonfire. They’d been studying regulatory peptides – chains of amino acids that regulate the central nervous system. They’re activated at times of high stress, or emotion: fear… hate… anger… love. Too much of it in the system can cause heart attacks, stroke, paralysis.”
Baxter still stood in the doorway. He leaned against the door jamb and crossed his arms, his lanky frame still backlit. Zack went on.
“So they isolated this one peptide in particular, one which damaged myelin sheaths – these are what protect the nerve fibers that transmit signals from the brain and spinal cord to the body. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, and the defection of some of their top scientists, this peptide was totally unknown in the west.”
“And so that’s myelin toxin?”
“Yes. Well, it is if you give somebody too much of it. The Kremlin was keen on it for two reasons. One, since it’s a substance that naturally occurs in the body, it actually wasn’t covered by the international Biological Weapons Convention. Second, and for the same reason, you can whack somebody with it – and it will look like death by natural causes. The coroner will find this stuff in his bloodstream. But this stuff is always in the bloodstream.”
“Nice.”
“If you want to put it that way. I mean, here was a bioweapon that was not only naturally occurring, but which they could use to damage victims’ nervous systems… alter their moods… trigger massive psychological changes. Or just kill, as the mood took them.”
Baxter squinted down at the older man lying in the dark. “I thought you had a masters degree in public policy?”
“I do. But my undergrad work was in cellular biology. Lingering influence of my plantation-owner parents.”
“Your parents were plantation owners? Did they have slaves?”
“Yes. Mainly me.”
“So did the Soviets succeed in weaponizing this stuff?”
“In the end. It only exists in traces in mammals, so they had to synthesize it if they wanted it in any quantity. This meant duplicating the genes for it, which they managed to do. And after that it was just a matter of splicing the DNA into whatever random cells they had in the lab. Then reproducing those. And then the real fun began.”
“A chimera virus?”
“Exactly. First they tried to create a hybrid myelin toxin/plague weapon, by splicing the virulent sections of DNA from myelin toxin into a bad-ass strain of plague they had.”
“Did it work?”
“Nobody knows for sure. We don’t think so.” Zack paused, and his lids lowered fractionally. It had been a long day. “However, we do know that they, or one of their heirs or successors, did manage to create a myelin toxin/smallpox weapon.”
“How do we know?”
“It’s what we call an existence proof. Because that’s what made it into the hands of Sheikh Atom and his a-S ass-buddies. That’s what we found and destroyed – within like minutes of when they planned on using it on the demining teams at Lemonnier. And it all went down a handful of miles from where we sit. In the bush of Somalia.”
Baxter looked impressed. “Okay. Now I see why you’re fixated on this stuff. You already dodged one enormous bioweapons bullet.”
“Exactly. And, by the way, with the relatively long incubation period, this one would have gone from the deminers to the garrison at camp. And then, via the global military transport network, it could have ended up anywhere. I don’t think these assholes thought about that, but then bioterrorists aren’t known for their long-range planning skills.”
“So this new outbreak,” Baxter said. “Do you think it could actually be a bio-terror attack?”
Zack blinked slowly. “That’s exactly it. There’s not necessarily any way to tell the difference. Particularly at first.”
“So that’s why you
worry every time.”
“Pretty much.”
“The chance that it might be bio-terror.”
“Or bio-error. Like I said, these guys aren’t rocket surgeons. They’re not the kind of guys you’d trust to work with Group-4 infectious agents and not, you know, make some terrible containment error.”
“I think I’m gonna have nightmares about that now.” Baxter cocked his head, as if trying to see something in memory. “What are the symptoms of smallpox, by the way?”
“Incubation period five to ten days. Onset of symptoms includes high fever, vomiting, headache, and a strange stiffness. Within a week, small spots start to appear, a rash on the face, which develops into painful blisters, then scabs, which fall off, leaving scars. Serious strains have a mortality rate up to 35 percent. Blindness, from ulcers on the cornea, is an occasional after-effect.”
“Jesus.”
“Smallpox has arguably changed the course of history more than Jesus. It devastated eighteenth-century Europe, and blew away most of the indigenous population in North America. Just in time for the white man to move in.” Zack paused to consider whether that was fair. The hell with it, he was nearly as white as Baxter.
“And the symptoms of myelin toxin?”
“In humans? Never tried, as far as we know, thank God. But animal tests indicated it would be nervous system stuff – tremors, paralysis, radical mood changes. Heart palpitations and heart failure at the high end.”
Baxter nodded, then pointed to his footlocker. “I really only came in to get my shaving kit.” He grabbed it and made his exit.
Zack sighed and thought about getting up.
But it was late now. And he was very tired.
Instead, he lay where he was – and allowed himself to start getting worked up again.
I mean, excuse me, he thought, as he had many times before, but what the fuck? Aside from the fact that the bioengineering of super-viruses was about the most evil and backward use of human effort and ingenuity imaginable… and since there was still every chance, in the view of this senior analyst, that it would be a virus that ended the story of humanity… it just struck him as particularly fucking stupid, even in a particularly stupid fucking species, to risk immanentizing the eschaton by intentionally creating something more virulent and hardy, something even worse, than the nightmare fuel already designed by natural selection – the most remorseless and efficient designer of biological predators ever known.
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